Fuming for two months in a jail cell here, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has had plenty of time to reconsider the wisdom of making “Innocence of Muslims,” his crude YouTube movie trailer depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty, philandering thug.

Does Mr. Nakoula now regret the footage? After all, it fueled deadly protests across the Islamic world and led the unlikely filmmaker to his own arrest for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction.

Not at all. In his first public comments since his incarceration soon after the video gained international attention in September, Mr. Nakoula told The New York Times that he would go to great lengths to convey what he called “the actual truth” about Muhammad.

So I’ve just received an email from a reader, asking whether I might have something to say about The Innocence of Muslims. “Is tolerance for satire really a concept that is not compatible with Islam?” he asks. “Is there something about all this indignation that ‘we,’ the West, don’t understand?”

When asked to explain Muslim rage, I have an answer, but I already know the response to my answer. A defender of “Western civilization” will tell me, “Yeah, but we aren’t violent. They’re the ones who kill people over religion.” If numbers matter, however, the mythology of “America” kills many, many more people today than any myth of “Islam.” To sustain a pseudo-secular military cult, we have produced a nation of cheerleaders for blood and murder. We speak of the cult’s heroic work as “sacrifice” and say that it’s all for a divine cause of “freedom.”

The worst idea ever, or the best idea ever? Could the Innocence of Muslims be so awful that it’s good? The Atlantic Wire writes:

For the most part, the West has been spared the kind of turbulent protests rocking the Muslim world in recent days, but that soon could change as anti-Islam groups threaten to screen the film Innocence of Muslims in the U.S., Canada and Germany. In a strange jumble of events, the provocative idea appears to have originated from the German far-right political party Pro Deutschland, assisted by Florida pastor Terry Jones and taken up by a Canadian Hindu advocacy group, in a move that will likely test the respective countries’ commitment to freedom of speech.

On Tuesday…the Pro Deutschland party announced plans to screen the incendiary film in a Muslim neighborhood in Berlin later this year. “We plan to show the trailer of the film at a public screening in a mainly Muslim area of Berlin on the first or second weekend of November and then, in a nearby cinema or suitable venue, screen the entire movie,” said Lars Seidensticker, chairman of the party’s state faction in Berlin.

With so much media noise about a con artist using more names than Blackwater, who has allegedly kept himself busy in his 55 years with everything from check fraud to producing soft-core pornography, it’s probably wise to take all of the initial reporting on Nakoula Basseley Nakoula with a pillar of salt. That being said, WIRED‘s Danger Room columnist Noah Shachtman has another bizarre addition to the story of this mysterious, and clearly upstanding, public figure:

Before he was involved in the making of a noxious video that provided an excuse for anti-American riots in the Middle East, and before he was convicted of federal bank fraud, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was arrested on charges relating to the making of angel dust.

Court records reviewed by Danger Room show that Nakoula and a co-defendant were brought before the Los Angeles County Superior Courthouse in Downey, California on April 15, 1997.

The Guardian’s Max Blumenthal has taken a stab at unraveling the making of the inflammatory film Innocence of Muslims, exposing a strange alliance of soft-core pornographers, political players and criminals. Undoubtedly, there are probably more layers to this particular onion, but this seems as good a place to start as any:

The Associated Press’s initial report on the trailer – an amateurish, practically unwatchable production called The Innocence of Muslims – identified a mysterious character, “Sam Bacile”, as its producer. Bacile told the Associated Press that he was a Jewish Israeli real estate developer living in California. He said that he raised $5m for the production of the film from “100 Jewish donors”, an unusual claim echoing Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style fantasies. Unfortunately, the extensive history of Israeli and ultra-Zionist funding and promotion of Islamophobic propaganda in the United States provided Bacile’s remarkable statement with the ring of truth.

It looks like the Associated Press has solved the mystery of who was behind the anti-Islam film believed to have sparked this week’s violent protests at U.S. missions in Egypt, Libya and throughout the Middle East.

That man is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year-old Coptic Christian with a criminal past who lives in California, according to the news wire’s digging, which has been backed up by a federal law enforcement official.

In an interview with the AP, Nakoula admitted to providing logistical support for the production of Innocence of Muslims but denied being “Sam Bacile,” the name given as the film’s maker. But the evidence cobbled together by AP reporters Gillian Flaccus and Stephen Braun suggests otherwise.

The AP was one of a handful of media outlets to publish an interview early Wednesday with a man who claimed to be Bacile.

The Middle East is in uproar today after the US Embassy in Libya was bombed and the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was among those killed. The attack was apparently part of a protest against an obscure film, "Innocence of Muslims," directed by California-based Israeli Sam Bacile and allegedly financed to the tune of $5 million dollars by Jewish supporters. There's little doubt that the film is blasphemous so far as Muslims are concerned and will likely be offensive to most non-Muslims. It also appears to be an incredibly bad piece of filmmaking based on the trailer below.